This app will make your next transit trip more 'beautiful' with music and soundscapes by Toronto artists

On an ordinary day in Toronto, more than a million people ride TTC public transit — and for plenty of those folks, music is as essential to the journey as a fully loaded Presto Card.

"A lot of people's inclination is to get on transit, put on headphones and tune out the experience," says Joseph Shabason, a musician who's played with Destroyer, The War on Drugs and his own Toronto synth-pop band, Diana. His latest collaboration is with musician/author Dan Werb (Woodhands) and Amy Gottung, executive director of Toronto's Long Winter Music and Arts Festival.

Together, they've created something that's especially for commuters: music inspired by the city's buses and streetcars — songs that respond, in real time, to the routes they travel.

It all comes pre-loaded on an app (A More Beautiful Journey) that's been free to download since Sept. 1, and the project was launched in partnership with the TTC and ArtworxTO, the city's year-long cavalcade of public art programming. 

GPS makes the experience uniquely tailored to a TTC ride. Elements of the music are triggered by various real-world locations or "sound zones" — which appear as colourful dots on the project map — and riders might activate more than one song during a single trip, each piece highlighting a different neighbourhood along the way.

This isn't music designed to distract, however. As Shabason explains, he wants listeners to actually engage with the world once they've popped in their earbuds. Maybe some things on a streetcar route are better left ignored — the mysterious funk wafting from the second row, for example. But what about the people and places encountered along the way? What are we missing out on when we shut out the mundane chaos of a commute?

The original compositions featured through the app are written by different artists, and each contributor has a personal connection to the route they've selected. Juno-nominee Chelsea Stewart has written a dubstep soundscape for the 32 Eglinton West, a bus that'll take you through Little Jamaica. The 300 Bathurst Night Bus zips past Koreatown — the namesake of that route's composer, local electronic artist Korea Town Acid.

"We really wanted the app to reflect the diversity of the city's musical traditions," says Shabason, and the collection includes a variety of genres and styles, from R&B to psychedelic art rock. More than 340 artists applied to be part of the project when a call for submissions went out late last year, and the final group was selected by a jury of several notable musicians, including Cadence Weapon, a Polaris-winning rapper who's intimately familiar with the task of writing music about bus routes.

Contributors had complete creative freedom, says Shabason, and some tracks lean into the interactive functionality of the app more than others. 

Amy Gottung, co-creator of the project and its creative producer, highlights a few particularly sophisticated examples — the tracks that incorporate more overlapping sound zones than most. For the 506 College streetcar, Stefana Fratila added field recordings from nearby High Park. Felipe Sena's soundtrack for the 29 Dufferin jerks from genre to genre as the bus lurches through its busy west-end corridor: Brazilian rhythms, psychedelic guitar, electronic beats.

And then there's Craig "CDH" Live's composition, an ambient soundscape written for the 123 B/C bus in Etobicoke. That one includes snippets of interviews with other musicians — folks from the area who unload their own impressions of the ride.

"You get all these wonderful meta references along the way of people sort of sympathizing with you," says Gottung. That track was one of her favourites to experience while driving around the city. "It allowed me to look at my fellow riders with solidarity as opposed to disgruntlement — which has more often been the case for me in the past," she laughs.

Not every track explicitly tackles the frustration and discomfort that's baked into the average rider experience: unexpected route delays, run-ins with rude passengers, a gauntlet of overstuffed backpacks crowding the aisle to the exit. But the project has a realistic attitude about our relationship with public transportation.

"I think on some level there's an acknowledgement that transit is friggin' boring," Shabason says, chuckling. "It's built into the title: A More Beautiful Journey. We're trying to augment people's experience."

I feel like there's no better city in which to launch a project like this. The genres and scenes around music in the city are just so varied and the city is so chock full of talent.- Amy Gottung, co-creator and creative producer of A More Beautiful Journey

Originally, he and Werb got the idea for the project while discussing the work of Hiroshi Yoshimura, a Japanese composer who wrote ambient music for the subway stations of Tokyo and Kobe, among other ordinary places. The duo wanted to do something similar for Toronto, and chased the idea for several years, even landing a meeting with the TTC pre-pandemic. But the idea would prove impossible. To pull it off, they'd need to install a new sound system at every subway stop. Plus, there were other logistical details to consider. What if the music drowned out public service announcements, for example? 

Werb and Shabason reached out to Gottung for advice; all three knew each other through the local music scene. The idea of taking the project above-ground was hers, as was the concept of deploying the music through a GPS-enabled app. 

That format also gives the project room to grow. At present, there are more than two dozen compositions featured on the app, but that's a tiny fraction of Toronto's overall transit grid. Current funding will only support the project through the end of 2022, but with the right support, Shabason says he'd like to soundtrack the entire city. Ideally, he says, the project would become open-source, allowing anyone to compose audio for their neighbourhood. 

"To me, that would be the most vital piece of public art because it would be constantly changing," he says. "It's representative of what people in that neighbourhood are listening to, what they want to create."

"I feel like there's no better city in which to launch a project like this," says Gottung. "The genres and scenes around music in the city are just so varied and the city is so chock full of talent."